For Hitchens, Torture is not Great

Christopher Hitchens once defiantly declared in a 2005 article for The Weekly Standard that "[p]rison conditions at Abu Ghraib have improved markedly and dramatically since the arrival of Coalition troops in Baghdad." I believe fully that he continues to stand by this statement, as consistency—never mind his minor shift from supporting left- to right-wing causes—is a hallmark of any good polemicist.

This past May, the author agreed to undergo waterboarding, the interrogation technique used on terrorist suspects by the US government that also became the focal point for what constitutes "torture." In light of yesterday's New York Times' story indicating that Guantánamo interrogation tactics mirrored Chinese Communist techniques described in a 1957 Air Force study, the evidence that we've unleashed an army of amoral (and ineffective) Jack Bauers on the world becomes harder to ignore.

While not conceding much in Vanity Fair's "Believe Me, It's Torture"—Hitchens cannot resist denigrating the "moral equivalence" of linking US "torture" techniques with those of the murderers of Daniel Pearl—he manages to convince himself that torture is not great through arguments of logic and that "ticking bomb" question: "once you assume that you are in the right, what will you not do?"

Word to the wise

Don't get hit by a car in Hartford, CT, or you could end up like this poor guy:



Don't you just love the guy crossing the street (probably to get a hot dog) or the Looky Lou on the scooter who makes a loop just to get a better view? Psychologists call it the "diffusion of responsibility" phenomenon, or the "bystander effect," explaining multi-witness paralysis in which people assume someone else will act. That's how a dozen witnesses failed to act during the infamous Kitty Genovese in New York in 1964.

FYI: 911 is a free call on mobile phones.

Another camera for lazy people

Smile. Resistance is futile.

Sony, not to be outdone by HP's slimming effect camera, last year launched its Smile Shutter™ technology, a feature that automatically captures a smile without your having to even press the shutter!

Such technology creates a new class of digital camera vampires: folks whose dour images resist capture. Now Sony has teamed up with Reuters (great for journalistic integrity, eh?) in the "Everyday Smiles" contest, in which winning photographs will be displayed—larger than life—in Times Square.

At least this way you'll have a good look at whom to slap should you ever run into these folks in real life.

Please Appease Me

A couple of my classes this semester have focused on political cynicism, and how news coverage contributes to antipolitics--a deliberate or passive distancing by citizens to politics due to discontent, despair, or indifference.

This "Hardball" clip illustrates well why many Americans want nothing to do with the asinine conversations that pass off as "debate" in the media. Kudos to Chris Matthews for stickin' it to this ignorant pundit, who should be sacked.

The Boys Are Back

My favorite Kiwis have returned with another music video after winning a Grammy earlier this year. I dig the mustache.

Save the Planet, Look Like Stay Puft Marshmallow Man

Jokes aside, this solution offers an entirely different way of tackling a problem. It shouldn't be necessary to cool an entire room in many cases (single people just hanging out at home, for example--I think of my ex-roommate who always complained about the temperature, thereby running the heat or AC all day whilst at work, resulting in exorbitant energy bills).

Leave it to the resourceful Japanese...they were thinking about this more than eight years ago, before it was cool (so to speak).

Crash

Bicycle culture in Haarlem

Today I hit my first pedestrian. I’ve had numerous close calls, but this marks my real induction into Dutch society.

Poor timing placed me at a rising canal drawbridge just fifteen minutes prior to class. Pedaling my rusty bicycle over cobblestone streets, I raced against the clock to reach the lab, print out my paper, and get to the lecture hall in time to avoid scrutiny from our ornery German lecturer, who has glared meaningfully at every student who dares to arrive even a minute late (and in a class with many Asians and Africans, he’s glaring an awful lot these days).

Since returning from my trip to New York, the weather has transformed from April showers to sunny summer days. Pale Dutch people—like all denizens of suboptimal climates—never take good weather for granted; they flood the parks in droves, leaving nary a patch of visible grass at Vondelpark or Westerpark. It makes me wonder where they were all hiding when the weather was bad (as it often is).

But my beef is not with regular Amsterdammers. It’s with the tourists. Damrak and the Red Light District, the rough equivalent of Times Square in New York, have become infested with wide-eyed, fannypacked photographers, drunken, blustery Brits peering into windows—any windows—and hippies eager to part with their euros at central smart shops. They ignore the wide, demarcated lanes with painted white marks forming the shape of a bicycle. They find the narrow, cobblestone streets so irresistibly quaint that they walk smack dab down the center—their own Yellow Brick Road to a customizable-to-one debauchery.

Well, as I mentioned before: I hit one of these suckers earlier today. Actually, it was a she. I rang my bell. She walked in the center of the street, even though the sidewalks were clear. And lest you think me unduly impatient, consider that my bicycle makes noise—lots of it. It squeaks.

Or maybe it squawks. Daniel, one of my football mates, once suddenly started scanning the horizon as we strolled from the park one day after practice. He pondered the whereabouts of an “annoying goose.” As I walked my bicycle along the canal, I stopped to listen. The “goose” went silent. “That explains why the goose was both annoying and so bloody consistent,” Daniel said with a smirk.

Between the bell and the squawks, I figured this clueless pedestrian would just keep walking straight. But no, she exhibited that maddening aspect of slow pedestrians: shifting paths without any regard to surroundings. You know what I’m talking about: the laggard you try to overtake (be it on the freeway or Fifth Avenue, the result is the same) who constantly drifts into your path in a zigzag fashion. You alter your path to avoid her, and she also lamely matches your move, as if engaged in slow dance for dunces.

That’s what happened. To make matters worse, we were right in front of a large café area, full of tourists enjoying kroketten, bitterballen, and vlaamse frites in the sun. As the moment began to unravel in slow motion, I could hear a collective gasp from the crowd as my front wheel collided with her ankle. I braked suddenly, the goose crying a desperate plea. I hopped off my bike. She looked shocked. No damage was done, but a nasty look registered on her face. I shot one right back and resisted my New York urge to flip her the bird and shout obscenities.

I shook my head visibly in disgust and biked quickly to class, where another glare awaited me.

Game Theory Explains the Dating Disparity?

A couple of articles focused on dating and the single woman’s dilemma have surfaced recently on several prominent Web sites. I wrote a critique of Mark Gimein's game theory article on Slate that alters my initial position on a Salon.com piece from 2005.

Originally part of my internship app, my critique goes to waste as they’ve already finished hiring for the summer (in that case, maybe update the Web site, eh?). Anyhow, enjoy:

In “The Eligible-Bachelor Paradox,” Mark Gimein begins with a fitting allusion to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, referring to what he calls one of “the great riddles of social life”: the lack of single, eligible men in the dating pool. It has become an unquestionable part of conventional wisdom—indeed, a recurring theme in contemporary commentary on gender relations —that a surfeit of appealing, eligible women overwhelms an effete, flawed male population. Gimein offers an explanation for such an imbalance: because of a “women choose” model for marriage, females enter into an auction scenario in which “strong bidders,” realizing they have fine prospects for a mate, stubbornly hold out for Mr. Right. Meanwhile, the “weak bidders,” their less appealing sisters, bid early and aggressively, thereby securing husbands while simultaneously draining the dating pool of quality, one man at a time.

As a woman who has dated extensively in New York City—arguably the nation’s dating disparity capital (if one is to use social statistics and pop culture references like Sex and the City as indicators)—I am in the awkward position of wanting very much to believe Gimein’s theory, personally, but finding it difficult to uphold, intellectually. While the author’s use of game theory and economics offers the comfort of academic rigor to illuminate the eligible-bachelor paradox, I challenge the basic premise that there are significantly more “attractive, eligible women” out there than “highly eligible and appealing men.” This underlying assumption also serves as the basis for Benjamin Kunkel’s commentary on Salon, as well as Lori Gottlieb’s “Buy It Now” argument posed in The Atlantic, referenced at the end of Gimein’s essay.

Perceptions of such an overwhelming disparity merit closer examination if they are to be used to advocate going on a massive sexual strike or settling for a loveless marriage, as the other two authors suggest. I use the word “perception” deliberately, because the flaw I see in Gimein’s argument rests with the definition of “strong bidders”—a perceived group of fantastic women who are underserved by the male population. Many of my single female friends possess the qualities generally associated with “strong bidders”: they are attractive, educated, and charming. During late-night chats with such friends, these traits are cited as evidence that men have it easier in the dating world because attractive, single women abound. I listened to and participated in such talks to the point that this dating gap—the eligible-bachelor paradox—registered in our collective consciousness as undisputed fact.

But I had to step back and take a closer look at my perennially single female friends. While each satisfies the loose definition of a “strong bidder,” they also tend to have various fundamental flaws that fall into a general category of emotional/personality issues, which disqualify them as the “great catches” so heavily advertised. This slippery quality—complex and specific to each woman, and therefore not easily generalizable to entire populations—is usually omitted from the criteria of “strong bidders,” despite the significant role it must play in the actual world of dating. And since such personality flaws are not as overtly apparent as height or underemployment (to borrow Gimein’s examples of male imperfection), they also manage to go undetected until much later in the dating game. Thus, where Gimein sees an abundance of single, attractive women, I see a number of single, attractive women who—although “strong bidders” by his definition—possess just as many deal breakers, although better concealed, as the men he calls “notably imperfect.” While I concede that a dating disparity exists, I believe it is on a much smaller scale than popularly imagined: many of the perceived “strong bidders” in this particular auction are simply bluffing.